Providing superior government services

Unifying technology for better service and profitability

As a leading strategic partner to governments around the globe, Maximus helps improve the delivery of public services amid complex technology, health, economic, environmental and social challenges. It delivers innovative business process management, impactful consulting services and technology solutions that provide improved outcomes for the public and higher levels of productivity and efficiency of government-sponsored programs.

Driven by a mission to strengthen the communities it serves, Maximus relies heavily on its ability to rapidly deploy high-quality, innovative and attractively priced services. This perennial challenge wasn’t helped by its sprawling IT estate — over 20 multivendor solutions including Cisco, Avaya, Mitel, Verint and Genesys; siloed tools and data; and differing work practices.

“To deliver continued service innovation and profitable business growth, we realised it was time to unify our contact centre operations,” said Angela Kovach, Vice President of Cloud Technology at Maximus. “That meant moving toward a common cloud platform, proving that approach in the US, and extending it to our international markets.”

Valued partnership

After bad initial experiences with another vendor, Maximus decided to standardise on the Genesys Cloud platform, built on Amazon Web Services (AWS).

“It felt like a true partnership from the beginning,” added Kovach. “We talked through how Genesys would assure the uniqueness that is Maximus — keeping our clients’ services and data securely segregated while leveraging economies of scale on things like licensing.”

Midway through the implementation, the company had to rethink its strategy again as the full force of the COVID-19 pandemic hit. “The combination of Genesys and Amazon WorkSpaces enabled us to seamlessly pivot to working from home and keeping services running,” said Julie Anderson, Director of Technology at Maximus.

IT benefits with excellent support

Over the next two years, Maximus went on to complete over 100 Genesys migrations — some within just two weeks — and stand up 35 new organisations. Additional savings came from system retirements (26 on telephony alone, with more to follow) and the consolidation of client projects from 134 to 93. Licensing costs have also significantly reduced by as much as 50%, while providing a better fit with the fast-changing needs of a BPO.

“Genesys had a true Contact Center as a Service offering, unlike other solutions that required a ton of configuration work and VPN connections,” said Charles Skowron, Senior IT Principal Architect at Maximus. “We no longer have to worry about maintaining loads of standalone products like IVR, call recording, quality and workforce management. And we appreciate excellent support and professional services from Genesys, which are tightly managed in-house rather than outsourced to third parties.”

Improving the way people work

Since the start of the deployment, its IT teams have set up 6,000 users across 100-plus sites throughout the US, Canada and Australia — with the UK set to onboard. The Genesys platform is helping improve how people work.

“Before, our advisors had to operate three or four screens,” said Derrick Douglas, Director of US Health and Human Operations at Maximus. “Now, they just have a single login and can easily handle calls and text and chat conversations through one desktop interface. And they get the data they need with less clicks and effort.”

Separate call and screen recording products have been replaced with one central system, simplifying quality management. Similarly, the company shifted its workforce management solution for migrated projects to Genesys Workforce Engagement Management. With the shift came expanded benefits like gamification for its employees and supervisors.

Closely tailored AI and digital services

Next, Maximus set about experimenting to enhance client propositions with artificial intelligence (AI)-powered extras like agent assist, topic miner, and speech and text analytics.

“With Genesys flexible licensing, we’re able to make features available faster to clients and on a much more selective basis — something we couldn’t do before,” said Douglas. “The fact that Genesys has now attained FedRAMP Authorisation is another plus when it comes to satisfying government tender requirements and helping us attract new customers.”

Genesys is helping drive better experiences from conversational AI solutions like chatbots. “Every release, we’ve seen Genesys AI improve substantially,” said Skowron. “We’ve done some comparisons between Genesys and other AI solutions. Over the last year and moving forward, we’ve decided to utilise Genesys AI for voicebots and chatbots through Genesys Dialog Engine Bot Flows or Digital Bot Flows for every implementation with conversational AI needs.”

Other innovations include automated QA scoring using sentiment analysis to quickly alert supervisors to coaching needs. The next stage of the company’s strategy is to capture results and quantify benefits from service enhancements like bots and gamification.

“As a BPO, it’s vital we provide a consistently great experience to our clients’ end customers while bringing in the project on time and within budget,” concluded Kovach. “Genesys gives us that certainty.”